This reeks of survivorship bias to me. I much prefer Andreas Madsen's more sober and self-conscious take on independent research [0].
> I’d spend 1-2 months completing Fast.ai course V3, and spend another 4-5 months completing personal projects or participating in machine learning competitions... After six months, I’d recommend doing an internship. Then you’ll be ready to take a job in industry or do consulting to self-fund your research.
Where are these internships that will hire you based on your completion of Fast.ai (if done in 1-2 months by a beginner I assume it's only part 1) alone, especially in 2020? How many are going to place in a Kaggle competition with just half a year of experience? More importantly, just how many people are privileged/secure enough to put their all into learning, with no sense of security or peer support?
> I started working with Google because I reproduced an ML paper, wrote a blog post about it, and promoted it. Google’s brand department was looking for case studies of their products, TensorFlow in this case. They made a video about my project. Someone at Google saw the video, though my skill set could be useful, and pinged me on Twitter.
So what really mattered was self-promotion, good timing, and luck.
> Tl;dr, I spent a few years planning and embarking on personal development adventures. They were loosely modeled after the Jungian hero’s journey with the influences of Buddhism and Stoicism.
Why does the author have to present his life like one would in a fucking college essay?
> So what really mattered was self-promotion, good timing, and luck.
Yes. He seems like someone who is good at self-promotion and networking. Well, good for him, but I think he underplays the role these have in his success.
> Why does the author have to present his life like one would in a fucking college essay?
I guess that's the self-promotion. And humble-bragging. Like this bit:
"I started working as a teacher in the countryside, but after invoking the spirit of their dead chief, they later annotated me the king of their village."
> Well, good for him, but I think he underplays the role these have in his success.
Exactly. Good for Emil, but it's always frustrating to hear survivorship bias preaching. Even the interviewer starts off by saying:
"By the way, I really love your CV - the quirks section was especially fun to read."
It's even more frustrating when I hear non-POC's talk about their journey to some non-western country (and subsequent conquering of fantastical goals like gaining the approval of locals) or pursuit of some sense of foreign culture. It's almost a given that they have internalized and appropriated the ideas (i.e. Buddhism or even worse post-retreat Buddhism). Good for the author to receive such positive feedback for such signaling, but it makes me sad to know that I might not receive the same.
> Where are these internships that will hire you based on your completion of Fast.ai (if done in 1-2 months by a beginner I assume it's only part 1) alone, especially in 2020?
I don't think the idea is to look for an internship after the course but an additional 4 months of personal projects. After applying state of the art deep learning for 4 months full time you'll have some very cool projects, and you could probably convince some company to take you on as an intern for a certain amount of time.
I should have been more specific and did not mean to exclude the other 4-5 months in his half year estimate. I meant to say no other background/experience to the position that would qualify the candidate for the role other than fast.ai v3 part 1. I love fast.ai and would still recommend it to all. I just think that the chances for getting into internships in that period, given the difficulties/inefficiencies/biases in the hiring process that even OP has mentioned, are slim.
Yeah I don't think it would be easy. I'm not in a data science role, but I do hire for software engineers. And if someone came to me with "Hey I'm trying to be a software engineer. I finished this boot camp 4 months ago, and since then have built these really cool projects. Could I work for you as an intern for the next 6 months to break into the field?" I'd totally say yes.
and truth be told: anders madsen has a full CS degree. So he basically took a 1-2 year private PhD-time, in which he produced 1 paper. Which is not terribly special. As for the person in question: there's money in it and if there are more aspiring people to do the grunt work (data cleaning, hyperparameter tuning) eventually prices will fall. And you definitely don't need a CS degree for that.
> I’d spend 1-2 months completing Fast.ai course V3, and spend another 4-5 months completing personal projects or participating in machine learning competitions... After six months, I’d recommend doing an internship. Then you’ll be ready to take a job in industry or do consulting to self-fund your research.
Where are these internships that will hire you based on your completion of Fast.ai (if done in 1-2 months by a beginner I assume it's only part 1) alone, especially in 2020? How many are going to place in a Kaggle competition with just half a year of experience? More importantly, just how many people are privileged/secure enough to put their all into learning, with no sense of security or peer support?
> I started working with Google because I reproduced an ML paper, wrote a blog post about it, and promoted it. Google’s brand department was looking for case studies of their products, TensorFlow in this case. They made a video about my project. Someone at Google saw the video, though my skill set could be useful, and pinged me on Twitter.
So what really mattered was self-promotion, good timing, and luck.
> Tl;dr, I spent a few years planning and embarking on personal development adventures. They were loosely modeled after the Jungian hero’s journey with the influences of Buddhism and Stoicism.
Why does the author have to present his life like one would in a fucking college essay?
[0] https://medium.com/@andreas_madsen/becoming-an-independent-r...